Translating Silences: A Cinematic Encounter with Incommensurable Difference

Abstract

In her introductory overview to “women’s cinema,” Alison Butler looks at feminism’s “work of recovering the history of women’s creativity in cinema” since the 1960s and 1970s (Alison Butler 2002, 3). Her rhetorical trajectory reproduces a teleology that perpetuates a problem her analysis seeks to mitigate. To accommodate its plural “forms, concerns and constituencies,” Butler productively defines “women’s cinema” as a “minor cinema” rather than a “counter-cinema” (in the Deleuze and Guattarian sense of a “minor literature” exiled and minoritized by the very language it inhabits), and analyzes U.S. women directors who redefine the grammar of film genre, narrative, and authorship while using cinema’s lexicon (Alison Butler 2002, 19). In distinction from these films, Butler argues that “the politics of location” central to all films, “and perhaps to Hollywood above all,” are “most fully addressed in relation to particular practices where national and cultural identity have been consciously considered rather than taken for granted: in national film movements, post-colonial cinemas and exilic and diasporic practices”(Alison Butler 2002, 23).¹

The Musalmaans were more large hearted, production was with them, grain, fruit, everything. And they were generous. Whenever anyone went to their homes, say if a Sikh went, they would give us presents, sukhi ras it was called, uncooked things…And they used to say very calmly, you [Hindus and Sikhs] don’t eat things cooked by us…you see we used to drink milk from their houses, but the milk had to be in an unused utensil, a new one…If we had been willing to drink from the same cups, we would have remained united, we would not have had these differences, thousands of lives would not have been lost, and there would have been no Partition.

Bir Bahadur Singh’s account narrated by Urvashi Butalia

For my own class in the decolonized nation vaguely conceived, I had little else but contempt. Now it seems to me that the radical element of the postcolonial bourgeoisie must most specifically learn to negotiate with the structure of enabling violence that produced her; and the normative narrative of metropolitan feminism is asymmetrically wedged in that structure.

Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak